I finished a novel once, printed off the whole thing 30 times; it cost me a fortune and I got back 30 rejections. I knew nothing of query letters, never even heard of them let alone knew how to write one! Ever think its your approach rather than your ability to write?
ok, was trying to cheer you up a little, maybe even motivate you to look at all your endeavours but hey ho...
Perhaps it's more your ability to edit than your ability to write that's the problem. Are you maybe submitting things for publication that aren't actually ready for submission yet? From the few things I've seen that you've written, I'd say you certainly can write. However, I think some of what you've submitted could use judicious pruning. For example, I checked your link to your Amazon book about the boy who needs to go into the 'haunted' house to retrieve his grandfather's baseball. There is a lot of good stuff in those first few pages ...BUT ...quite a bit of faff as well, that could certainly be cut to improve the story flow. It's mostly cutting, not re-writing, that I think would improve that first chapter and make it read more smoothly. I don't have the text in front of me here, but little things like going on about the kids' backstory (bicycle theft, etc) right at the moment when they're confronting a creaky house and potential ghost, is not a great plan. It screws up the story's momentum and makes the suspense you have created ...scared boy, creaky door, a bit of vapour, etc ...grind to a halt. Stuff like that can make or break your story. You've put all the elements you need in there, created a convincing scene, and your language and characters are good—I especially like the boy who always knows the story behind any abnormal happening. There is strong motivation for the MC to go into the house after the baseball ...it belonged to his grandfather, his parents don't normally allow him to play with it, and now he's lost it. All these things are good, and bode well for an exciting story. The fact that somebody MAY have died in the house is very scary indeed. But it all gets bogged down in extraneous detail about what the boys did before, who stole a bike, who found the bike, etc. The bike theft doesn't have a lot to do with the present scene, does it? If these details are important to know, find a way to include them later on ...but NOT in your initial suspenseful scene. Let us get to know these boys by what they do here, not what they did before. There was a lot of extra dialogue in that passage that could have been pared way back as well. The yes he did no he didn't yes he did kinds of exchanges. That might be what gets said in real life, but it's not generally a good idea to reproduce entire semi-mundane conversations when creating a story. Just things I remembered from reading it. However, these are all EDITING issues, not writing issues. I'd say take a break, recharge your batteries, find a beta reader or readers who will give you detailed feedback, and then tackle what you've already written, with a few to sharpening the focus of your story and getting rid of the stuff you don't need. I think you'll find your good writing is being smeared over by the not-so-good bits. Remove these bits, and you're in business!
I began writing in 1998. It took me several years to complete my first novel (Relic Tech). Like many writers, I taught myself how to do it (this was largely before forums like this one here were established). That first novel, I kept sending it out. It made it out of the slush pile with two major publishers (I didn't go the agent route) but doing that takes a lot of time--waiting for a decision, even to get rejected from a slush pile can take months or longer. In the mean time I wrote another novel (Flank Hawk) and began submitting it. Third time out of the slush pile, an editor/small publisher offered me a contract. It took me 18 months to write Flank Hawk and more than twice as long to sell it. While I was waiting for that 2nd novel to sell, I wrote about a dozen short stories and sold most of them to semipro markets. Once Flank Hawk was published I began writing the sequel, Blood Sword. I wanted it as a standalone, so I went to my old routine of studying successful writers--how they write standalone sequels in a series--and wrote Blood Sword, which my publisher was waiting on (and is currently waiting on Soul Forge--the third novel in the series). In the mean time, after the rights to my short stories reverted to me, my short stories were published in a collection (Genre Shotgun). Finally, after Relic Tech was rejected by a the 2nd big publishing house after having run the slush pile gauntlet and having been passed up the line, and finally rejected, my current publisher read the SF novel and decided it was good enough to publish. But see, with the major publishers, I am competing against established best-selling authors for a slot, just like you are with agents...your work has to really wow them to commit to a novel/author. I suspect my work is pretty darn good, as the editor who ultimately read Relic Tech (I am not sure why it didn't make the cut, as they as a rule don't say) wrote a really positive blurb for it (for the back cover/inside pages) when I asked. So that tells me he thought it was good enough to put his name behind, just not good enough to break into a crowded lineup of established authors with that publishing house. I just keep at it, knowing the competition is stiff--very stiff, and knowing that even with the small publisher my works are published through, other aspiring authors are competing against me, and if my novels don't sell/turn a profit, that next contract probably won't be there. My point is, that I didn't give up with that first novel, or wait to see if there was success at the end of the tunnel. Like you have, I just keep busy writing other novels and short stories while striving to learn and improve my writing skills and storytelling ability. It sounds as if you're swinging for the fences...and there's nothing wrong with that at all. If ten years of the process is enough for you, northernadams, then throw in the towel. Because maybe that contract will never be offered--even if you obtain a respected agent. Maybe none of your works will ever break out. Like I said previously, there are many activities that can replace the time and effort spent writing and seeking publication that might make you just as happy, or happier.
This made me chuckle, because I had a publisher doing a paid critique at one of the two conferences I've been to tell me that I first needed to have a chapter just about the stolen bicycle, and that perhaps that was my real story. I said, "Are you serious? Stolen bike = exciting, haunted house = boring?" The only reason I put that in was to show that 1) Mickey loves to solve mysteries, and 2) characterization to explain the unusual circumstances under which these kids first met. Another editor told me to ignore Mickey and focus on the 'bad kid,' Charlie. That's the other thing--I spent the first at least four years doing this. I get it critiqued, and make the suggested changes. I show it to someone else, and they tell me to do what in effect would be putting it back to what it was in the first place. Same thing with queries. I have 22 queries on this story. There is absolutely NO way to write any one story in a way that all these agents, editors, and publishers want. The only thing they're all in agreement on is that they don't want anything I've ever written.
Oh, dear. I begin to get the picture here. What a shame that you've been yanked from pillar to post, especially when I think your first instinct was correct, regarding the stolen bike. You can indicate Mickey likes to solve mysteries in a few words, but right now his concern is getting his baseball back, and the house scares him. (Quite rightly too, I gather, from what happens later.) My own opinion is that we don't need to know the backstory about how these kids first met—at least not IN THIS SCENE. Let us figure out Charlie and Mickey and the other boy from watching them act in this and subsequent scenes. If Charlie is 'bad' and well-written, we'll get to him ourselves, without the backstory infodump. Of course it's possible this isn't the best place to start the story, and maybe an earlier chapter (shudder, even maybe a Prologue) covering the bike-stealing incident might be the way to go. However, I suspect not, although I haven't read your whole story. Yours is a perfectly good opening chapter—and the ending of it is excellent and certainly would make a person want to keep reading—but the beginning needs work on the flow, in my opinion. It's a stuttery start, with all the digressions into backstory and repetitive dialogue. I tend to suffer from the same problem when I'm writing. I am total crap at beginnings, and always want to include everything that ever happened before, in order to 'explain' things. Everything comes with backstory; 'reasons' do underly current events—and the reader needs to know these reasons before we begin the story. Or not. Writing isn't life. Chapters need focus, with minimal digression from the story problem at hand. It's a tricky dance, getting this balance right, and it's a challenge I've needed to work on myself. This is why I'm so alert to the problem. I don't know. This is frustrating. Trust me, you are not alone in feeling like you've tried everything and nobody has 'bitten' yet. Of course you can just give up, believe that nobody loves your work, and quit writing. I can understand why you might feel like doing that, especially if the suggestions you've been receiving are contradictory. Just because you pay somebody to 'help' you doesn't mean they're any good at it, though! Or maybe they're good for another kind of writing, but not for what you're doing. There are a lot of people out there who are taking money from newbie writers for that kind of 'service.' (Reminds me of the folks who made fortunes in the USA during the various gold rushes, by selling provisions to hopeful miners, rather than doing any mining themselves!) I'd say pay attention to what people tell you, but don't be too quick to implement every suggestion they give you, especially if it goes against your own instincts for the story. And definitely beware of taking suggestions from people (like me) who have NOT read your entire story. Nobody can see the shape of a story until they've read it all. Nobody knows what needs to be included or left out, until they've read the whole thing. (If I had a Kindle, I'd buy your story ...it's good enough for at least a look at the whole thing. However, I don't have a Kindle ...yet...we're working on that! ) Don't feel you need to defend yourself either. Just try to be objective and make up your own mind, without clinging stubbornly to every word you've written OR being too quick to throw the whole thing into the garbage. The best thing that works for anyone is distance, and I strongly urge you to take a break. Either from writing in general, or from a specific piece. Take enough of a break so that when you read it again, it's as if somebody else wrote it. If parts of it make you cringe as you read, that's excellent. You'll know you need to get rid of these bits or modify them in some way. 'What to do next' will be obvious, and less painful as well. One of the great joys of writing is KNOWING you've just improved your story 100% by making a few changes to it. In some ways that's more satisfying to me than getting it perfect the first time. I guess I'm a 'fixer' at heart! I think you've hit the nail on the head in your last paragraph here. There is absolutely NO way to write any one story that will please all agents, editors and publishers. So I guess the best thing to do is write what pleases you ...but don't be too easily pleased!
